Welcome to the Q&A Forum

"So instead I took some advice and changed them to 200, but with a "noindex" meta tag and set them to not render any content. I get less errors but I now have a lot of pages that do this."

I would not recommend keeping it that way. You could mass redirect them to the sitemap page if they are passing PR and or some traffic, and there is no logical other place to point them.

404's are not really something that can hurt you, providing that they are coming from external sources and you aren't providing 404 links on your site to dead pages on your site, if there are these, then you should fix the internal links at the source.

I would refrain from using tag pages. Google does not like thin content pages and tag pages are typically just a set of links to other posts. Also, I have seen too many sites with too many unintended tags.  Category pages give you a lot more flexibility in terms of adding unique content and making them into pages worthy of ranking. Plus, category pages are in a controlled environment and there will not be any categories being accidentally formed.

While I would normally suggest using categories in the URL, exceptions certainly apply. Can you please share some examples on how you would like to form your URLs.

There are many potential issues that can occur if the newly coded site is not done under proper SEO supervision, such as:

• not correctly 301'ing the old urls to the new ones
• unintentional duplicate content issues
• pagination issues resulting in unwanted pages getting indexed
• sitemap xml files not coded properly
• site structure not passing page juice properly
• switching over from old server to new
• difference in on page optimization
• improper coding of robots.txt (unintentional blocking or blocking too much)
• improper coding of schema markup, or other coding errors
• implementing a CMS or platform that doesn't allow enough SEO flexibility
• poorly written urls without keyword targets in the file names
• poorly optimized images and alt tags
• possible coding issies causing google to not be able to read sections of content on the site
• server performance / page speed times that is worse than the old site's performance
• less effective user experience resulting in higher bounce rate and less time spent on site
• unintentionally allowing https pages or non www (or www depending on preference) pages to get indexed in addition to the main intended site
• HUGE mistake i have seen a lot of times, forgetting to completely block the dev version of the site, and google seeing your site and the dev as as identical indexed sites

One site if all somewhat related, several sites if completely different. You don't want shoes, car parts and landscaping on one site. You do want car parts, van parts and motorcycle parts on one site. The single site will be stronger than several smaller stand alone sites.

Some of our sites are seeing this as well. I would venture to say that this is a fluke and not a leading indicator that the snippets are coming back.

these pages are 99% similar to each other:

http://www.copyscape.com/compare.php

If you want a old school strategy like this to work there are no short cuts to creating unique content specifically tailored to that location.

Do three things

a) add the meta noindex

b) add the search section you don't want crawled to your robots.txt file

c) request url removal in webmaster tools

doing the first two steps will ensure that the pages remain unindexed after you remove them in WMT

The first glaring problem I see that could have caused this penalty is the shared header navigation across all subdomains. Each subdomain should have main navigation to it's own pages - you have a shared nav on all sites that is interconnecting all sites like crazy, and also sending the crawler everywhere.

http://scarf.yournextshoes.com

Agree, don't rebrand, too much risk of losing traffic. Or keep the old site and create a new brand site so you have two sites, just don't tie them together in anyway. The only issue with that is it needs to be all unique content.

If the links are set to NoFollow, it shouldn't have any impact. However, many SEO's feel that excessive links can set off a a spam trigger even if they are set to Nofollow. If the links are set to follow, than I would certainly be concerned if you had money keywords as your anchor text links. I would edit all the articles and eliminate all the links. Avvo lets the lawyer link to their website so adding these links in their answers isn't necessary at all. I suspect that this lawyer probably utilized this same linking strategy across other web channels. Good luck cleaning this all up.

Just one more note:

You have a Double Redirect and you should write your Rewrite rules to avoid this double redirect as each redirect will cause some loss of page juice.

Checked link: http://www.opiates.com/

Type of redirect: 301 Moved Permanently

Redirected to: http://opiates.com/

2.

Checked link: http://opiates.com/

Type of redirect: 302 Found

Redirected to: https://opiates.com/

The Google algorithms are very complex. There are many factors that are taken into account for Google ranking positions like trusted backlinks, age of site, percentage of healthy content, schema markup and more. New sites have a barrier to entry and must prove they are worthy of being shown in the SERPS.

That's perfectly fine.

Just to add a little bit to the previous responses. Assuming each rug is truly different, then you could have on each product page: a general paragraph about the collection and an unique paragraph about each individual product. I would advise using schema tags (http://schema.org/IndividualProduct) and try to figure out which fields can truly be unique per item. Unique photos and videos for your products is also helpful in providing uniqueness to your pages. I realize that 4k is a lot of product to have unique descriptions and you can noindex non-unique pages until you update them.

Never change domain names unless it is no longer the companies name, or in case of a massive penalty. I've seen so many sites do this and lose all of their traffic. Also, if the new site is a different architecture there are important SEO considerations to make sure you retain as mush PR and traffic as possible.

We have a team of 3 people, located in NJ and do advanced SEO for small to large sites and have more experience than almost anyone you will find out there. Let me know if you would like us to take an initial look at your site.

I use linkresearchtools.com but keep in mind that all links need to be manually vetted, and that by disavowing too many links you can actually harm your sites rankings because you are cutting off page juice. Do your best to balance between disavowing really bad links with low or no PR and keeping ones that might be helping you, especially if your site is not actively building new good links. Also, never let a person or company upload a disavow file without giving it a second look.

If you are paying a company to build links for you, and they refuse to show you the links they have built I would be very weary. Tell them you can't pay them if you cannot see that the work has been completed.

"Technically speaking with www is a different URL that the one without www so you link building efforts would be split across two domain which would not be cool."

The non www should 301 to the www version, so it's not two sites, it's one. If it's two separate sites indexed that needs to be fixed asap.

But if you are www then your links should be www as well so that no page juice is lost because of the redirection.